Text 1 On January lst the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation did something that may help to change the practice of science.It brought into force a policy,foreshadowed two years earlier,that research it supports must,when published,be freely available to all.On March 23rd it followed this up by announcing that iiwill pay the cost of putting such research in one particular repository of freely availablc papers.To a layman,this may sound neither controversial nor ground-breaking.But the crucial word is"freely".It means papers reporting Gates-sponsored research cannot be charged for.No pay walls.No journal subscriptions.That is not a new idea,but the foundation's announcement gives it teeth.It means recipients of Gates'largesse can no longer offer their papers to journals such as Nature,the New England Joiu-na!o[Medicine or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,since reading the contents ofthese publications costs money.One criticism,in a world where most non-commercial scientific research is sponsored by governments,is that there should be no further charge for reading the results of taxpayer-funded work.Journals,in other words,should have no cover or subscription price.A second is that the process of getting a paper published takes too long.Months-sometimes years-can pass while a hopeful researcher first finds a journal willing to publish,and then waits for peer review and the negotiation of amendments.That keeps others in the field in the dark about new results for longer than is really necessary,and thus slows down the progress of science.Third,though this is less easy to prove,many researchers suspect that anonymous peer review is sometimes exploited by rivals to delay the publication of competitors'papers.Partial solutions to some of these problems have been tried.The Gates foundation is experimenting with carrots,as well as sticks.It has offered the publishers of one top-flight journal,Science$l00,000 to make papers published this year about Gates-sponsored research free to read from the beginning.If this goes well,the experiment may be extended to other publications.Similarly,there is a movement among some publishers to make papers free to the reader by charging the authors for the costs of publication-usually in the range of$2,000-$3,000 per paper.But many now think these are half-measures,and that a real revolution in the idea of scientific publishing is needed.25.The author's attitude toward free academic publication is